News

[20 July 2015] In this interview at The Grown-up Geek, I got to talk about two of my favorite things, comedy and social science.
We talked about how comedians like John Oliver, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are using the power of comedy to bring attention to socially-important issues.

[31 December 2014] I appeared on Huffington Post Live to discuss Google Trends' 2014 top searches and what they say about the world.

[24 August 2014] A survey of social science work using social media data sources has just been published in the Annual Review of Sociology:

Web and Software

timeu.se - What do people do all day? By collecting millions of messages from Twitter, we can explore in great detail exactly how people report spending their time. (a companion to Golder & Macy 2011)

Note: the live site at http://timeu.se was decommissioned in December 2016 after five exciting years!

The Dialect Survey - a series of questions to explore words and sounds in the English language. A very early example of collecting social science data on the internet. (2002; in collaboration with Bert Vaux)

Essays

Social Science with Social Media - This short essay (with Michael Macy) appeared in the ASA's newsletter, Footnotes, in January 2012. We describe how social science can use social media as a source of behavioral data.